Bouncing Back from Failure

In today's video, I want to talk about the good, bad and ugly about my business growth journey and most importantly, what I've learned over, you know, the last seven, eight years or so when it came to just helping others in this shift from agent to owner in their real estate business. You know, traditional success in the real estate industry is hard. It will have you working every evening, every weekend, every vacation, doing things that you're surprised you're doing right. And so this decision to go down the business building or the business growth path to build out sustainable systems in the business is not one that I take lightly. I'm super passionate about it. And if you're at the point in your journey which you know you wish there was kind of this roadmap to achieve it, stick around to the end of the video. I want to share the Real Estate Business Growth Navigator. This is a report I put together. It's. It explains the six stages of growth and the questions you need to be asking yourself at each stage. If you like the video, give me the thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel and make sure you turn notifications on if you're new to the channel. And maybe you haven't heard me tell my story before or you haven't heard me on the podcast. I want to real briefly kind of explain my journey in business and how I went from, you know, new agent, Rookie agent, selling 27 homes in my first part year in real estate to 400 transactions fully leveraged with me working one day a week. And that was only about five or six years into my journey. And I did that all during the Great Recession years. You know, how did we go from 15,000 agents in Charlotte to 5,000 agents? And I got into the business 27, 44, 58, 118, 178 families served, 248, 312, 400 plus. How did I make that journey? And when we talk about the good, bad, ugly along the way, there are a few things that I want to share with you that will make the journey easier. You know, building a business requires the concept of leverage. And there's different forms of leverage. There's like actual leverage in terms of marketing systems or sales systems or even leverage with technology and leverage with, you know, just systems for everything you do in your business and then also people, right? So leverage is something you cannot avoid if you want to go from the grind that is real estate. And you want to build something that allows you to have a life that has a little bit more freedom of time, of money, and freedom from stress. You know, when you're looking to bring people into your world, the first word of advice, and the thing I failed most at is do not look for potential in someone. Look at their patterns. If you go to YouTube and you Google Steven Furtick relationship advice, he's my pastor, It's F u R T I C K relationship advice. There's like a minute and a half video where. Where. When I saw this sermon live, it triggered something in me that I've never forgotten. I think it was because half of the people on my team I had hired for potential. So essentially, potential is like, hey, you've never actually done sales before. Imagine I'm sitting across from a buyer agent prospect that wants to join my team. Hey, you've never done sales before. You actually have no track record of hustle or discipline. You've never really read a book before. You know you're not a good team player. You never demonstrated that in your path. And you don't have a growth mindset, you know, in terms of reading books and advancing. But you're going to be great on our team. Like, you have your license and I think it's just going to be awesome. I just see potential in you. You tell me you want to make six figures and it's going to be awesome. It's never awesome. Never ever does that prove out to be an awesome situation. You're 3, 6, 12. I've been flying four years in before with an agent that never demonstrated any sort of track record or pattern of achievement before joining our team. And they continued to not show up and to not be accountable and to not be disciplined, to not hustle, to not work hard, to not want to improve themselves. Right? To not be a team player. And so that is the thing I can share. That is the bad and ugly part of good. Bad and ugly is always hire for patterns, not potential. And it's not so hard to even recognize patterns. Like, hey, talk about how you hustle and work hard in your life today, right? This is when you're talking to somebody, talk about where you hold yourself accountable or the disciplines you've installed in your life. Let me see your calendar. How do you organize your day? There's just tangible things that we can ask somebody before we allow them into our world. So that's the first tip I have for you. The second tip and area of massive failure for me was sacrificing time with loved ones as I was growing my real estate business and not having standards around my time. You know, when I look back on the way that I built my business and the way that we coach others to do it. Now we're having massive success in terms of business growth and all the metrics around a healthy business and getting, you know, agents to become business owners and to be out of production if they want, and go from 70 hours to 40 hours a week and, you know, quadruple their income. All of that good stuff. When I did it, I really invested a whole lot of time. I didn't have this roadmap. I was failing a lot because I really didn't know how to go about this business. And so when you think about how you want to live out your business and how it's going to fuel your life, don't make the mistake that I did. Be super clear with loved ones in terms of boundaries with when you're going to work, when you're not going to work. Share your ideal week. You've heard me talk. Hopefully if you've been following the channel or listening to me in the podcast, you've heard me talk about this ideal week. Create your ideal week every 90 days and do this activity with your spouse or your children, if they're old enough, and say, hey, listen for where I'm at in my business growth journey. You know, wife, kids. I'm still at the point where I need to work a couple evenings a week. I'm still at the point where I need to take Saturday morning appointments. For almost three years, when I was the main listing agent on my team, I had given up buyers or have my buyer agents showing homes to my buyers. So I wasn't working evenings and weekends with buyers. I was still taking listing appointments. So I still had one or two evenings a week that I negotiated with my wife, Julie, that I was able to work. And every Saturday for, I think two years straight, nine at 9:00am, 11:00am and 1:00pm I went on listing appointments. And that was just the agreement that I have with my wife at the time. It was where I was in my journey. And so that was part of my ideal week. My ideal week included having two listing appointments in the evening. Monday through Friday, no Fridays, that was family night. Saturday night was date night and having three appointments. Like, I was disappointed for that season because it was my ideal week for several quarters that I wanted to have those time slots booked out. Turns out that you can actually do listings during business hours. We have a virtual listing consultation process now that allows us to do consultations virtually bring in husbands and wives and, you know, multiple parties to kind of do a process that's virtual and we get even better conversion rates. At the time though, I didn't have that. I didn't know that that was working. And it just so happens that as I'm recording this, we're in a global pandemic which forced us to re envision how we interact with potential clients through a virtual consultation process. So as you look at your business, you know, what are the areas where you can start to make this shift around? Giving up too much of your time and sacrificing the time, time that matters most, you know, the regrets you're going to have in life. I promise it's not going to be around how many homes you sold. It's going to be the lost time with loved ones. So that's tip number two is don't do what I did. You know, be really intentional with your time and make commitments to your spouse and be on the same page as them. The last tip I have to share with you in terms of my failures in business and how I've seen others fail massively. And I would say even if I give them advice around this point, they still, still don't listen until they fail themselves in it. It is buying leads from someone who's a better marketer than you. And you know, we talk about the key drivers in a real estate business. We talk about, you know, being able to attract buyers and sellers. Attract does not mean you go and pay Zillow 5, 10, 20. We've had folks come into our world that are spending 60, $70,000 a month paying Zillow and they're like I have got marketing down. Check the box on marketing. We have an endless supply of high quality leads. And I'll give you the high quality leads part of Zillow. They 4x pricing on their leads. They came into my market as an iBuyer and wanted to push real estate's real estate agents 100% out of the transaction and go direct to consumer and eliminate and take the entire commission. Right. Do you think those paid lead sources, these big, you know, real estate search engine portals, right. If you think they're your friend, you have got to come to Jesus with me here on it and realize that you have to be the one that is is communicating to us to a prospect. So the tip I have for you in terms of how I've seen folks fail is that you have to decide how you're going to be different. And we've decided on our team. This is four years ago we stopped all paid lead sources. We, we don't Pay for any lead sources and we do 3 million a year in a market that has an average price point about 275,000. So no paid lead sources yet. We're a multi million dollar real estate team. How do we do that? We've committed to serving our client at the highest level and letting them be the engine that drives growth in our business. And what that means is that we acquire a client. So say we acquire a listing. All of our systems are baked out in a way that allows that client that to feel like this is the best service experience they've had in any industry that they ever experienced. This is better than Disney World. This is better than going to Nordstrom. This is better than think of the thing that you've experienced, the business that you've experienced that has left you in awe of that experience. That was like a high emotional, just wow experience. That's the intention we have in our real estate business. And if you're not taking that path, you'll always be a slave to buying leads and letting someone else become a better marketer than you. You know we have 1300 five star reviews online. Think about that. Over 1300 five star reviews where, hey, just go check us out online and see what others are saying about us. I couldn't write even if I wanted to and it was ethically okay for me to write reviews about how awesome we are. I, I couldn't write what our clients are saying about us. So we do a great job on the service side. We ask them to say some kind words about us. We use those kind words in this virtual virtuous cycle to get more business and we're actually getting business. If you go to Google, type in best real estate agent, Charlotte, North Carolina. You will see high performance real estate advisors. That's the business that I've co founded. You will see that show up high in the search engine. I think it's number one in any market that you type it in. And so business has come from the fact that we've just shifted to focusing on the consumer. The last thing that's broken in the real estate industry, well, there's a lot of things. The biggest thing that's broken is the fact that nobody's really building out systems that tend to buyers and sellers. Right. Brokerages are trying to figure out ways to add value to agents. Right. They're doing what they can to acquire more agents and hopefully they bring on more than leave them. And agents are in this belief system that it's the brokerage that is going to help me be successful. It's not. It's yourself that's going to help yourself be successful, right? If you can just do a great job for every client that you're in front of and serve them at the highest level, build systems that provide a level of service that they couldn't imagine being possible, then you will win the game of business. If you're at the point in your business growth journey which you just want the roadmap, tell me what the six stages are. The questions I need to ask myself. The the limiting beliefs that I have at different stages of growth, the tools and systems that I need to be installing or thinking about. Go to realestatebusinessgrowth.com or click on the link below. Actually wrote a report called the Real Estate Business Growth Navigator. It'll give you everything you need to go from agent to owner in your business. If you like the video, give me the thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel and make sure you turn notifications on so you're the first to know about new videos when they drop. We'll see you on the next video.